


I found the monolith, chalk in the rain, The palm of your hand in mine scraped clean

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Your daughters shall be soldiers, Your sons their patron saints [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Blood and Violence, Character Death, Deaf Clint Barton, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Love, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-29 00:47:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20073370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: “What’s her name?” Steve asks and already, already Tony’s conditioned to smile, even as the letters grace his lips.“Morgan,” he says, nothing more beautiful, nothing more graceful, nothing more true. He loves her more every time he looks at her, every time he says her name.“Beautiful,” Steve comments.“She is.”Does he know? Perhaps he does. Because he waits, keeps waiting. Lets Tony breathe in and out, three, seven times.  Patient, patient like a sniper in a nest.“Did you know Hawkeye had a daughter?”





	I found the monolith, chalk in the rain, The palm of your hand in mine scraped clean

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授翻】孤石血泪，手心伤痕](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20398849) by [Carmen_Shing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmen_Shing/pseuds/Carmen_Shing)

> Lovely friends,
> 
> You overwhelm me with your kind reviews and enthusiasm, seriously it means a whole lot!
> 
> There are a couple of instances of **graphic description** in this fic and I want you to be aware of that and to proceed with caution because this is **an unhappy story**.
> 
> I'm slightly figuring out Tony's voice here, so your patience would be massively appreciated. I envy anyone who can do Tony Stark justice when they write him because he is a fiend to put words to. (If you have any advice, throw it at me, please!)
> 
> Also, I did a thing. It's a bit of a weird, is-this-Stony vibe. It's _not_ Stony, however, reading it back, I think maybe it's an if-you-squint deal, if that's your thing. Or it's more, if Tony didn't have Pepper, he'd probably have had Steve. But I adore what Tony and Pepper have, so this is not Stony. (Mostly.)
> 
> Kudos and comments are so thoroughly appreciated.
> 
> Yours gratefully,  
LRCx

*

Close to the barrier, he leans in, quietlike. Deadly, deathly, in his eyes and in his mouth.

_I guess you’re on the wrong side of history after all._

Tony leans in, quietlike, deadly and deathly, too.

_On the right side of these bars, though, _he whispers back, smiling through the sting.

And then. And _then._

Unforgiveable, some might say.

(Tony. Tony would say.)

*

Between all the other false starts, there’s this one.

Natalie Rushman, who is not yet anybody but a wickedly delicious distraction from Tony’s impending demise, tells him: “Good day, Mister Stark. I’m going home now.”

“Says who?” Tony demands. A tone to match the clink of ice smacking the belly of his glass. The glug of vodka a burn in his nose that isn’t ironic yet.

Natalie, all eyes and mouth, sultry.

“The CEO of Stark Industries.”

She’s got a face that makes a man hungry; all kinds of cruel jibes on Tony’s tongue to cut her soft edges with. He doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t _know. _But he will, soon enough.

Walking out the front door, she’s got a glide like a dancer and Tony in the doorway, watching her slide her petite frame into and under the powerful arm of the slouching man who’s waiting for her outside. Tall, suited; big shoulders and no apparent interest in Tony, only in her, which, fair enough. They’ve got that in common.

“Incredibly rude not to introduce your boyfriend to your boss,” he tells her, loudly and without caution.

The guy turns his head and looks at Tony, impenetrable. He’s got a poker face like a slap. Pretty, maybe, if he didn’t have a stare like a bullet in a void. There’s a hearing aid hooked over his ear, flesh coloured, noticeable.

“You’re not her boss,” the guy says over their shoulders, lips close to the round of her red curls. American, brassy. “And I’m not her boyfriend.”

His arm’s still over her shoulder, though. They still saunter synchronised, hip to hip, close as chemical bonds.

The guy’s suit is cheap, but Natalie’s beauty is the giving kind. It doesn’t consume so much as offer. Half-wrapped around her, the man’s as much a million bucks as his not-girlfriend’s smile.

Tony forgets him within the hour.

It’s unclear, later, whether this is the work of the palladium poisoning, his own inattentiveness to things he does not give worth to, or Agent Barton’s natural ability to be as unmemorable as anybody Tony has ever met.

Whichever, or perhaps all three.

He forgets him, and then he remembers.

*

It doesn’t take long, once Agent Barton becomes Hawkeye becomes Clint, for Tony to wonder how he ever forgot him at all.

Abrasive and smug and generous, insecure and ferocious. His friendship like the kind Tony used to burn green over, sixteen years old and lost amidst the college age bromances he couldn’t settle into. Easy, uncomplicated, reliable; a constant thing, taking up little space in Tony’s orbit.

Just there, sturdy and strong.

*

Until Barton, Hawkeye, _Clint. _Until he is no longer there at all.

*

_Clint’s hurt, Tony, _Steve says, in that cold, one-heartbeat room. Rusty metal in his throat.

And Tony, he is unable to find the words to dispel that terrible illusion. So, he just replies, shameful, quiet.

A timid, reluctant: _Yeah, he is._

*

It starts, maybe, in New York. Wrecked by her attackers, and also by her saviours.

*

When it starts, Tony snaps up the Avengers like the rest of the world does their collector’s cards.

He gathers them together, scoops them up ice cream, holds them in his greedy grip.

They eat shawarma.

Tony thinks about calling Pepper, but he has the terrible feeling that talking to her will make all this very real and he’s not quite ready for that yet. So, he eats shawarma with the people who lay down on the wire with him.

Captain America hasn’t even heard of shawarma, which goes a long way to explaining the shoddy job SHIELD’s been doing of giving the guy a proper A-Z of the 21st century. Sure, Tony has no damn clue what it is either, but he’s a billionaire, he eats pizzas imported from Florence. He has excuses.

Banner is reserved, the balancing act of hunger vs danger playing out perfectly on his face. Tony figures the best way to wrangle a Hulk is to just leave no room for doubts, so he slings an arm over Banner’s newly covered shoulders, a little too big for the jacket he’s been given, and commandeers him immediately.

Thor needs no convincing, beyond turning _shawarma _into _a feast of shawarma _to make it sound a bit godlier. Despite his watchful eye on his brother, he’s eager for the chance to celebrate amongst _true warriors, _at which point, Tony makes every attempt not to look at Rogers, who’s been giving him covert glances for a while.

Black Widow, Natasha, _Natalie, _either has too many things to say about shawarma, or absolutely nothing. She gives a curt nod of her head and then stands to attention next to her partner, Hawkeye.

Hawkeye, who looks, quite frankly, like the only place he should be going to is Medical. Aside from a brief stint of unconsciousness following his rough liberation from Loki’s grabby sceptre, Tony doubts the guy’s rested since he was grabbed in the first place.

He nods at the mention of food all the same, taut as the bowstring still slung over his back, and brings up the rear of the crowd, Romanov beside him.

It’s purely accidental, Tony is sure of it, that he’s still in earshot when Barton murmurs: “I should talk to Phil.”

“Later,” comes Romanov’s cool, easy response.

It churns in Tony’s stomach. He focuses very hard on not turning around, his poker face at war with his fatalistic curiosity.

Barton makes a shuffling _“He’ll be–” _attempt but is cut off by Romanov, who speaks in a cutting, diffident tone.

“He’ll be busy cleaning up your mess, Hawkeye.”

It stings _Tony, _hearing it, can’t imagine the killer strike it must be to Barton. It’s a fight to keep walking down the street, his eyes on the dust particles clinging to the crimson of Thor’s cape. The air is thick with crushed brick and mortar, the streets sparkling with fragments of glass.

Tony tries to hone in his senses or his suit’s individual mechanisms, the tight folds of armour at his joints, the soft alloy clink of movement. He wonders idly if he could maybe just start sleeping in the suit. For safety. A precaution, of sorts.

“S’g’nna be pissed.”

Barton’s voice still breaks through his mental logistics of an Iron Man sleep mode like a wrench and Tony’s jaw locks. He wonders if Super-Duper-Steve can hear this bullcrap.

He doubts it. Thor’s mid-regale, his voice booming.

“He’ll forgive you, if you still hand your paperwork in on time,” Romanov replies.

Tony feels cold all over, at how easily the lies are falling out of her. How natural they are, how readily Barton accepts them.

Boy, he hopes he’s long gone before Barton finds out the truth.

The shawarma place is, miraculously, still standing. A little battered, but the cookers work, and they pile in together with a kind of collective relief that Tony feels in his lungs and his guts and his toenails.

He catches Romanov’s eye as she slips past him. Acid glare, daring him to breathe.

He tips his ear at her, hopes it’s clear enough how deeply disconcerting her relationship with truthfulness is.

She’s unsurprisingly indifferent to his silent judgement. She guards Barton with cold eyes and steering movements, leans towards him to speak, and he looks at her mouth a lot, but the intimacy is – _strange. _Comfortable, not tactile; secretive, not sensual.

He’s reading her lips.

Tony’s long gone before Barton finds out.

*

Six weeks later, JARVIS alerts them to an incoming Avenger. There’s only one missing that isn’t on an entirely different planet right now.

The silk spun Natasha looks neither surprised nor pleased by the news, but Bruce has perked up and Steve looks just about ready to bust his gut he’s sitting so upright.

They’re clustered like an accidental fanfare and Tony has just enough time to think _Firework Arrows _before Clint Barton exits the elevator.

He’s wearing a pair of threadbare jeans and an even more obnoxious Captain America t-shirt than the one Tony bought in bulk to fill Steve’s wardrobe with when he first got here. It’s one of the vintage war poster ones, slogans all along the neckline and Rogers’ _You Can Do It _face transferred over his shield. Underneath the join of his left elbow is a strap of thick, dark leather that Tony had thought was part of his armour, but apparently not.

He’s carrying a grand total of a duffel bag, a quiver and his bow, fully extended even though Tony’s seen it folded down to packing size. His grin is toothy, bright eyed, and Tony’s seen it before, that smile. Seen it on the cover of Time Magazine with the title _Where Next, Tony? _The issue that came out the day before his thirtieth birthday.

“Please tell me you took a cab like that,” Tony says, springing to his feet and looking gleeful.

Barton’s grin, more lopsided than before, a little bit more natural, before transforming into a crude smirk as he walks directly to the couch and sprawls over it, all graceless limbs.

“Subway,” he corrects, and Tony laughs approvingly, watches the way Barton takes Natasha’s feet when she puts them in his lap. Digs his thumbs in hard and precise, like a ritual, or a game.

The room breathes a little easier and Tony breathes with it. Breathes with them.

*

Tony grabs them for his own, and Pepper, she gives him this look. This look that says: _They won’t give you what you need._

She’s rarely wrong, but this time. This time.

Barton sits cross-legged on a worktop in the lab and makes intricate paper airplanes for Butterfingers to catch and fetch. He’s been teaching the bot paper football and it’s disgraceful how well Butterfingers has been picking it up.

“How does it work?” Barton asks, simple, distracted, nosy. Flicking another paper fold at Butterfingers’ makeshift goalposts. “I mean, all I could figure out from your file is that it’s kind of like a magnet.”

He gives the circular light in Tony’s chest a glower, like it’s rude to be so complicated.

Tony is momentarily speechless.

People don’t ask about it, is the thing. Maybe because they think it’s impolite but it’s never felt that way. Tony’s pretty sure it’s more just an accepting assumption. _Oh, yes, Tony’s a genius. He built a thing and it works._

Tony has explained, in-depth, the full intricacies of the machine sitting inside his chest twice, and one of those times was to JARVIS.

“Oh, Errol,” he sighs big, like he’s been tasked with the impossible. “This is way beyond your middle school physics.”

Barton’s eyes on him, bullets in the void.

All those friendships Tony coveted, sixteen years old lost amidst the college age bromances he couldn’t settle into? This is why. Because he grew up without boundaries, the good kind that gave him everything and the bad kind that reserved nothing for himself, and when he says things, he really doesn’t know what side of those lines the words will land until they’ve struck.

Except Barton, except, _Clint._

His smile cracks wide through his bullet hole stare and he chuckles, baritone warm.

“I’m flattered you think I got all the way through middle school, Tony.”

In his relief, Tony forgets to rein that one in. Forgets to point out that he knows full well all the education Clint Barton’s powered his way through on his own, refused to bow to his battered pride carnie status that he flashes like his fakest smiles.

Doesn’t matter, maybe. Clint knows, and so does Tony, and that’s enough.

Clint flicks his last paper goal, fist-bumping Butterfingers, who immediately starts gathering up all the folded pieces for a rematch. He looks at the hologram Tony brings up, staring at the separated components of the arc reactor with the same face he gives his quiver when it’s getting empty.

“This is way beyond middle school. You’re gonna have to break it down for me,” he says, and Tony grins bigger than he means to in response.

*

When SHIELD’s assessment ended with a firm _Iron Man Yes, Tony Stark No, _Tony maybe, possibly, potentially took it personally.

In his defence, it was an extremely personal insult to dish out.

The thing is, that assessment never really went away. It festered like a wound. It burrowed deep like shrapnel; got into his blood like palladium.

He does his best not to wonder who else on the team has read those remarks. Who else maybe, possibly, potentially agrees with them.

*

Tony grabs them. The likeminded scientist with a few kinks in his anger management, the God of Thunder with the heart of solid gold. The master assassins that carry between them their own gravitational orbit; circle one another as two trees that have grown into their shared sunlight. And a Captain, stars and stripes; Tony’s first idol, the one he never quite overcame.

*

Tony eventually lost count of all the things his dad had to say about Steve Rogers from an early age.

_He was brave. He was strong. He was a hero, an inspiration, the one you wanted at your back. Thoughtful, sweet, reckless, everything._

Tony ate it up, early on. Hung on those words like scripture, like the deciphering key to the code of his father. If he just memorised enough of those brave, strong, heroic, inspirational, thoughtful, sweet, reckless, everything details, he could become what his dad needed most.

And then there’s the other one, of course. The one that showed up later, both then and now.

Howard only ever mentioned Rogers’ best friend once, that Tony can recall.

_He was kind, _he said. _Hot-headed, and almost as bad a cheat at cards as Rogers. But he was kind, real good._

He said it the way he sometimes said things to Tony, with this crease in his brow, eyes screwed up, mouth curled into itself.

Baffled, like he wanted to ask _Why? _Yet couldn’t bring himself to.

*

Tony never figured that one out.

*

Hawkeye, though. Clint Barton, the damned fool. Figured it out and maybe even fell in love with what he found.

Could bleed kindness from a stone, that one.

Could’ve bled love from rocks.

*

“We need to make sure it never happens again, Stark,” Ross says from across the table.

Tony thinks _it_ is a pretty small word to cover the vacuous pit of all the things that can never happen again.

A city in the sky, Veronica clamping around the strain of the writhing Hulk. Steve, standing at the window, holding his breath like he’s underwater. A mother screaming into the crown of her dead child’s brow.

There are so many things Tony wants to never happen again.

Eventually he’ll add the Sokovia Accords to that long, lonesome list.

He’ll add leaving people behind in a semi-submerged sea prison.

He’ll add Germany and Wakanda, and he’ll add Siberia.

*

A piece of Tony Stark never leaves Siberia.

He separates a limb from a man’s body with a laser beam.

It’s a metal one, sure, but it’s still an arm. Fused to his body, to his exposed nerve endings; wired into his very core, electrical impulses connected all the way to the roots of his spine, designed to act and react like flesh and blood. To feel real, at least to its user.

It would have been nothing short of agony. Phantom, and the other kind, too.

A piece of Tony gets left behind. The part of him that had forgotten he was a temporary fixture in Steve Rogers’ life, a place marker filling a gap. The part of him that consciously, willingly, hungrily mutilates another human being.

He is ashamed. Frightened of himself in a way he has not been since – perhaps ever.

His mistakes, they’ve always been big, been massive. Catastrophic, even. He’s thoughtless, impulsive, reckless, whimsical, insensitive, impetuous, all those things, and more. These are words that have been hurled at him his whole life, by his best friends and his worst enemies alike.

He’s never been malicious, though.

Tony feels ashamed, and it hurts. It hurts, because Steve doesn’t even act surprised at what Tony’s done. Like he always knew that Tony was capable of base cruelty. Like he’s been expecting this all along.

Maybe that’s the worst part of all.

*

_He was kind, _his dad said.

Tony thinks about that one a lot.

He never finds out for himself.

*

The thing is, Clint gets shifty, the first time Tony asks about his ears.

Of course, that’s probably because Tony’s a tactless enthusiast who brings them up while everybody’s arguing over the last egg roll across the table, like Tony can’t just buy another carton _each _for them.

He doesn’t mean for it to come out.

He doesn’t mean it.

Point Break’s returned, with news of his darling brother’s incarceration – an ongoing saga, apparently, and for some reason he actually looks kind of sad about it – and is stooping to pulling the offering-for-the-gods card over fried veggies, while Bruce rehashes his _I lived in Calcutta _schtick and Steve bellyaches about the serum calorie requirements and even Natasha makes a stab at the Avengers’ non-existent egg roll chivalry.

Tony’s mid-explaining how he bought the goddamn egg roll so he should eat the goddamn egg roll, when he sees the flash of Barton’s eyes, too fast and too wide. The shrink of his chin ever so slightly into his chest.

“You know, I could probably do something about that if you give me ten minutes of ear time.”

The bantering comes to an unexpected, unwelcome halt. The Avengers stutter their way into darting looks to Tony, and to the object of his attention, which is mainly Barton’s ears.

He’s a genius, they seem to have forgotten. He’s been an expert on deafness since he spotted Barton’s eyes lingering on Romanov’s mouth too long without kissing it.

Barton blinks at him twice, face suspiciously blank, and the lack of response really is just some kind of invitation for Tony’s mouth to keep running. They haven’t learned yet, haven’t figured out how to just run right over him the way Rhodey knows, the way Pepper does.

“It’s the overlapping voices, right?” he says, leaning in to see the rounded purple plastic sitting over the shell of Barton’s ear, even as Barton instinctively leans back. “Digital, I assume. Wider frequency range than most, but I’ve seen SHIELD’s idea of med-tech. If it’s TBI –”

“Stop,” Barton says, very sharp, sharp like he’s never sounded, not even at Thor’s mention of Loki.

Tony stops without really intending to, eyeful of Avengers looking anywhere from confused to pissed.

“Right,” he says, and he’s not flustered, he’s _not, _but damn does Black Widow have a violent glower. Still, Tony’s had his fair share of uncomfortable silences, and this doesn’t rank all that high. He picks up the tin foil carton holding the prized object of argument. “Come to the lab. We’ll put some time in. Here. Have an egg roll.”

Barton’s lips twitch, and Tony’s going to take it as a smirk and not a grimace. Barton’s got a flush creeping up his throat, and he doesn’t look away from Tony as he warily reaches into the extended carton and picks up the last egg roll, biting it in half and throwing the other half perfectly onto Natasha’s plate without looking at her.

Typical.

For a moment, it seems like nobody is ever going to speak again.

Until, quite out of nowhere.

“Tony, if that’s what we’re going to be getting out of your motormouth, feel free to say something tactless about my _Capsicle _days next time, OK?”

Bruce makes a scoffing sound, and Thor throws in twenty cents worth of godly agreement, and Barton, he actually _laughs, _and Tony doesn’t miss the look of warm, fleeting gratitude that he flings Steve’s way. Tony can’t quite bring himself to give one of those looks to Steve, too, but he feels the need for it, the instinct an underworked muscle.

So he laughs instead, and they quibble about timeless soldiers and Chinese food in thirties New York, and Barton keeps kind of quiet, still, but he doesn’t shrink into his shoulders anymore and he stops leaning away from Tony, too.

They put in that time in the lab, a couple of weeks later.

Barton sidles in, post-mission. A black eye and his hands stubborn in his pockets.

“It’s fine most of the time,” he says too loud, too proud, like he’s doing Tony a favour stopping by. “I can live with it.”

“Sure you can,” Tony says, greased to his elbows and frazzled on caffeine. “I can live with this.” He taps his arc reactor, glowing faintly under his t-shirt. “I’m still going to upgrade it when I can, though.”

Barton looks like he wants to argue, jaw squared the way it was a year ago, arm over his not-girlfriend’s shoulder, their steps in tandem, dancers in a battle.

Then again, Barton always looks like he wants to argue. He wears it brassy, like his accent, and his knack for cartwheels when walking would be more efficient. So, rather than pussyfooting, the way he maybe should, Tony just goes straight for the jugular, because that’s what he’s best at.

“TBI, right?”

Barton does have a handsome smile. Tony’s seen it. The charming, lovely one that he pulls out when the coffee’s fresh.

This one, though, it’s almost ugly. No teeth, tight lips, eyes scrunched to hide the hate.

“If that’s what we’re calling a belt buckle these days.”

It’s probably supposed to make him flinch, but Tony doesn’t, and Barton looks more pleased than disappointed by that. Tony just smiles back, the way he learned to as a kid, in all those Stark Family press releases.

“Gimme your ears, Katniss,” he says, patting a clean worktop and hosing down his hands and arms in the deep sink. “There ain’t no belt buckle that’s a match for Tony Stark.”

Barton snorts, and calls him an asshole. He holds out his hearing aids, all the same. Slips them off one by one and barely tenses when he hands them over.

Tony’s pretty sure Romanov’s lurking, just out of sight. Just in case.

In case of what?

He doesn’t call them out on it.

*

Four years later, four short years.

Four and a half, but who’s counting?

(Tony. Tony’s counting.)

Four years later, Clint. StarkTech in his ear canals, an Iron Man shaped bruise across his ribs. His hands against the barrier that separates them, friend and foe. Futurist and fatality.

Clint opens his mouth and out falls hellfire, burns Tony hot into the night that chases them.

And Tony, he responds.

Jesus and his Mother. Tony responds in kind.

*

Tony leaves. He leaves them.

He leaves them there, alone.

*

And later, much later. Too late, as it turns out. He comes back.

*

The signal is faint, a hummingbird heart throbbing between the radio waves swallowing it up.

Tony sits in the pilot’s seat, forcing himself to remain fidgety and curious about the jet’s sleek monitors and interface, compiling lists of questions to ask Wakanda’s engineers when he meets them, maybe some suggestions on the steering system. Anything to fill the void of inactivity from his co-pilot.

Beside him, Natasha is still as a monument, staring ahead into the darkening skyline. She hasn’t moved in over an hour, hasn’t spoken in twice that, not since answering the call from Sam Wilson, whose voice had crackled like gravel across the distance while they pretended it was the technology hindering his words.

Tony tracks the signal, growing closer but not stronger, and refuses to entertain the one terrible thought that keeps clawing at his hindbrain, begging attention.

_What if they’re wrong?_

So desperate to catch a break, they’ve latched onto a simple hope like children to a mother’s hand, not sparing room for doubt, too destructive. Too easily grown even in the poorest of conditions – especially in the poorest of conditions.

Tony watches a thin cloud dispersing, indigo rose, as the stars above the Atlantic start to glitter, eager constellations. Perhaps, some four thousand kilometres east, thirty-thousand feet below, they are waiting, hoping on a prayer for a rescue that they don’t know is speeding ever closer.

He imagines them, bloodied and whole. Resilient, the way all super soldiers and carnie folk are. Tony’s seen them bleed a hundred times. Last month, Tony made them bleed himself.

Beside him, Natasha’s eyes turn northwards, where the sky is closer to gold than blue. She is vanishing before his very eyes. By the time they land, whatever they find, it will not be Natasha Romanov by his side. It will be the Black Widow.

For the first time in years, that is less than comforting.

*

_(That’s called indentured servitude,_ he told Senator Stern. Plays back the tape, five years later. Drinks for four days.)

*

Here’s the thing.

A month after Tony leaves a fragment of himself behind in Siberia.

When he stands in a hospital room in Wakanda, looking at a raw nerved Steve Rogers hooked to an IV in a bed, Sam Wilson standing sentry, James Barnes sitting vigil.

When Tony looks at them, Wilson’s broken arm, Rogers’ clenched fists, Barnes’ hollow eyes. When Romanov’s gone rogue and Barton is dead. When Tony hears them talking about Hawkeye’s resilience like it made a shred of difference to how easily a knife carved out his eyes and throat.

When it comes to all this, Tony’s response is to say to them, quite simply, quite accurately: _“Bunch of soldiers.”_

Because that’s what they are. First Lieutenant Wilson, Sergeant Barnes, Captain Rogers. Like the start of a lengthy, winding _walks into a bar _joke.

It’s in them. It _is _them, as far as they are concerned.

He says _Bunch of soldiers_ because he hates it. He says it because he knows the three soldiers in front of him can’t parse out the difference between hating that and hating them.

He says _Bunch of soldiers _and they think he means it as an insult, his own metaphorical picketing. They think he says it because it disgusts him.

It doesn’t. It just breaks his heart.

Or, at the very least, the piece he had reserved, the backup fragments unscarred so far.

They look at him. Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers and James Bu-fucking-chanan Barnes. Broken arm, clenched fists, hollow eyes. They are soldiers and they are proud of it and they rise to the bait of those that would sneer upon that silhouetted identity they have cloaked themselves in.

They look at him, three soldiers, the whole bunch of them, and Tony, he’s filled with a corrosive, terrible fit of rage on their behalf. That they will take comfort from the fact that their friend died for days, that they will see strength where he can only think _suffering._

Tony’s not a soldier. Tony’s never been a soldier and he never could be one.

Tony’s not the brother-in-arms kind. In fact, only last month, he thought he could try, and just look where that got him. Even if he is a brother-in-arms, he’s not _theirs._

There is a chance that when Tony says _Bunch of soldiers, _he says it with envy.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.

*

Story of his life, maybe.

*

_(Story of Barton’s, _the insidious demon of his conscience whispers back.)

*

Tony’s never in good spirit called him anything that isn’t Rhodey, or Honeybear, or once, just once, James.

FRIDAY, like JARVIS before her, only ever calls him Colonel Rhodes.

Who exactly do they think programmed that?

*

Tony cuts off a man’s arm with a laser beam.

There are some things in this life that there’s simply no justifying and for the next eighteen months he thinks about that, about that and about his dad’s confused little frown, question mark shaped like guilt.

_He was kind._

*

The kid says, _please, _and Tony, he tries to say _sorry, _but the words, they fall apart on his tongue.

Ash in his mouth.

*

Here’s where they end up.

Tony wakes up. He wakes fast, dizzy even though he’s lying down, wakes with bullish snorts and flapping limbs and he flinches back from a pair of hands that cradle his face. She doesn’t pull away and he grabs her wrists, squeezing tight; holds her fingers to his wet eyes and kisses her palms.

Pepper. Pep.

The first thought of his every day and the last word on his lips the day he dies.

“Sh, sh,” Pepper says, in command of herself and of him.

His heart, his every fibre. He belongs to her, for her.

It’s dark, what little illumination there is pours in through the glass walls. He’s brittle and hoarse, depleted. Pepper, radiant, exhausted. The tragedy in her eyes is all the swansong he needs.

They failed. He has no idea how long it’s been since he got back. Two hours, two days, two weeks. Doesn’t matter. Pep looked heartbroken when he landed, but now. Now she looks hollow, she looks resigned.

Tony kisses the pads of her fingers, one by one, salt and skin. She smells of sweat and perfume and toothpaste and he cannot banish the singular keystone of his ability to breathe from his sorrow-hardened being.

_Pepper is here. Pepper survived. She survived._

Monstrous guilt, poisoned like an oil spill pooling in his intestines. He has no idea the total damage. The world is undone. But Pepper, she’s here. Her mouth on his, her hands, her hair.

“Pepper,” he whispers, his one and only prayer, sacrilegious to his bones.

Tony turns his head on the pillow, bones creaking fragile, to look through the glass. He notices too late a broad, bulky figure sitting vigil in the corner. His face, half in shadow, his blond hair pushed back and his body folded up.

Steve doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t have to, never did.

He looks as lost as Tony feels. In his hands, stretched taut, a band of thick dark leather, which Tony would recognize anywhere. For a moment, they look at each other with new eyes, haunted eyes, canyons between them.

“Get out,” Tony says, measured and scratched, and Steve doesn’t bow his head quick enough to hide the tracks of his tears that slide silent, same as his poster boy smiles.

“Tony,” Pepper says, the only one to say it like that, to say it precious, careful.

He clutches her hands to his chest, rears back with the child’s strength of his shoulders and watches Captain America get wearily to his feet. Grieving, pained. Tony wonders with hollow cruelty if it works like bullet holes, if Steve will recover easier than the rest of them from this, the way he does from everything else.

His ravaged blue eyes speak a different song.

“Cap,” Tony says.

Steve comes to a cumbersome, stilted halt, one hand on the doorframe and his shoulders kissing his earlobes. His eyelashes cling clumpy with tears when he looks back.

“We’ve both got blood on our hands.”

Steve nods at that. Turns a little better, his profile lit silver, that golden era glory in his devastated face.

“Bucky told me what you did. For him. You know.”

He says is weary, says it stoic. Without preamble, without context.

Pepper’s nails bite into Tony’s palms, her breath warm against his ear. Steve holds his hands to his stomach, packing a wound long healed.

“It’s more than I managed,” Steve admits and oh, how that must burn him, burn him to his core.

Tony doesn’t know what Barnes said to Steve, only that he doesn’t care, that whatever he said, he’ll have said it wrong, because Barnes didn’t know shit and neither does Steve. Tony saw his face up on that holoboard, lost amidst the vanished, the thousands, the trillions, and he wants to say something. Something like empathy, like sympathy, because fighting got them nowhere and there’s no point to it, now.

What comes out instead, pitiful. Old words from an old version of himself, one still stinging, self-contained, sixteen years old and lost.

“Barnes finally bit the dust.”

Hates himself, the way he always seems to around this man, just a little, too much, not enough.

Steve smiles, then.

Steve smiles when he’s hurting. Tony knows that, because he knows Steve Rogers. Tony has known him all his life, heard third-hand stories across the dinner table, clung to scraps of Howard’s words just to soak up the splendour and then heard them first-hand – a whole lot less damn _hero _– from that smiling mouth.

So, Tony opens his goddamn mouth and out spills barbs of weapons long cast aside and Steve just smiles and says, cracking like the world beneath his feet:

“Take care of yourself, Tony.”

He means it, is the thing. He means every word he says, that’s why it _hurt, _back then, back when_. _Because Tony’s the one who says all kinds of terrible, meaningless things, he’s the one who flings insults like snowballs expecting them to land soft, forgetting sometimes they sting. Steve doesn’t say things he doesn’t believe, that’s his line in the sand, and it’s the one they couldn’t step across together.

Tony opens his mouth to reply, can’t let that be how they part, but nothing happens. His throat, dry, dry like being stranded on another planet while the universe crumbles.

Steve closes the door quietly behind him as he leaves.

Tony closes his eyes, might be trembling all over, might tremble apart completely only, Pepper. Her hands, her fingers, her knuckles, holding him together the way she’s always held him up; his air, when he can’t breathe. His eyes when he can’t see.

“Tony,” she says, precious and careful, smelling of sweat and perfume and toothpaste, holding his face, brushing his cheeks like she’s wiping away tears, kissing his mouth like she’s silencing his cries.

“Pep,” he whimpers into her mouth.

The first thought of his every day. The last word on his lips the day he dies.

*

_You left them, you left them there alone, _he bellowed, thrown like a shield with deadly accuracy. A weapon, this man, built for purpose, one he fulfilled and then some, every time.

And Tony. He did not dodge the blow.

*

The world ends. The universe, it succumbs to the snap of a mad man’s finger.

Tony doesn’t stop him, doesn’t save them. There is a delay, between Thanos disappearing and Thanos actually winning.

Strange says, insufferable and cryptic: _Tony, it was the only way._

And Tony, he takes that idea and his big, stupid brain runs with it, runs all the way home.

Because Thanos still needs the mind stone, which means he still needs Vision, which means he still needs to hit Earth. He needs to get past the tattered remains of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Natasha and Bruce, T’Challa.

He needs to get past Steve Rogers, the immoveable object and unstoppable force combined.

Tony had no idea how much faith he still had in Captain Rogers’ stubborn ass, not until it becomes clear, twenty minutes later, that Rogers has failed, too. Until the kid whispers _sorry _before Tony can whisper _please._

Strange says _the only way _and for some godforsaken reason, Tony’s first and third thought is _Steve, Steve Rogers._

And when they all disappear anyway, when it becomes unforgivably clear that they have lost, it is undeniable, the sheer, unquantifiable disappointment that rips open Tony’s heart. Hits him where the shrapnel never reached.

*

It was kind of like that the last time, too. When Romanov was quiet across the cockpit and Wilson was loud across the continent and Tony thought: _They’ll be fine, they’ll be good, both of them, of course they will. Steve’s there, Steve, he won’t, won’t let anything happen, they’ll be fine._

*

_Clint’s hurt, Tony, _Steve says, in that cold, one-heartbeat room.

*

Tony grabs them and then Tony lets go.

It starts like this.

The end, it starts like this.

*

It starts with the same punchline to all the jokes that came before: Tony, working alone in his lab.

This is the moral to every fable, Pythia’s foresight manifest. Tony Stark alone. Tony Stark in his lab.

The Young brothers are deep into their sixth album on the third cycle of their legacy when FRIDAY interrupts him mid-solder.

FRIDAY’s proved to be a good deal snarkier than Tony had anticipated, but it’s rare that she stoops to actually turning his music off unprompted. Even J had only done that three times in his entire evolution. Tony had been oddly proud, the first time.

“FRIDAY, you’re killing me, girl,” Tony says, or _tries _to, dropping the soldering iron and lifting the faceplate of Mark XXXI, which he still hasn’t quite gotten around to renaming something other than Banner Lab Buddy 2.0 – a title it had earned heroically after the incident with the gamma laser, a uniquely perky deprogrammed piece of _repurposed _Hammer Tech and a very close encounter with the Jolly Green.

Tony doesn’t really get a chance to say anything though, because before he can, FRIDAY says:

“Boss, a Wakandan jet just landed on the roof.”

Relative to the many, many things that have happened in the past year – in the past month alone – this actually doesn’t rank very high on the weird or alarming scales as far as Tony is concerned. What is both weird and alarming, however, is FRIDAY making such a big deal about it.

“Well, I did tell the Cat King to stop by anytime,” he says, giving the lab a sweeping glance to check there’s nothing too suspicious lying around.

Of course, he hadn’t _meant _it when he suggested as much, but then, Tony’s not sure how much he ever means when he speaks these days. Used to be he always knew when exactly he was wearing his Tony hat and his Stark cap. They weighed differently on his head, and on his conscience. It’s blurring at the edges, that definitive split.

_(You’re slipping away, _she said, _You’re going to drag me with you and I don’t know how to stop it. Except like this.)_

“Boss, the jet has remained in stealth mode and upon touch down, my sensors on the landing pad were overridden.”

“And you didn’t think to _lead _with this?” Tony snaps. He feels that lashing whip of anger striking outwards from the reactor in his chest. It’s so tightly coiled, _he’s _so tightly coiled and it’s painful, how right Pep was, he can’t even keep his own AI –

They happen simultaneously, several important things.

FRI says, _“Boss” _again, the same way she said it after Tony suggested doing an in-house EMP test run.

The lab doors open.

And Tony, Tony feels the clenched fist of shock wrap tight around his spinal column.

“Hello, Tony,” Natasha says.

Natasha. _Natasha._

She’s here.

She’s standing in the glass doorway to the lab, wearing tactical gear with her dark red curls hanging limply on either side of her pale face. She looks – _tired._ Tony’s not sure when he last saw her looking tired, not sure when he last saw her looking anything other than lethal.

A shot of unkind pleasure pierces through the fog of his surprise.

_Good, _the worst impulses of his scarred heart whisper. _Let her suffer for her silver._

“Back so soon, Natalie?” he asks, as he steps out of the rest of the dark plated suit and pointedly doesn’t glance over at the east panelling, behind which the upgraded components of Mark XLVII stand to attention, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, much like himself. “Have to say, I didn’t think you’d fold first. Aren’t you designed for all weather conditions?”

This is probably when he’s supposed to get FRIDAY to send a signal to the Secretary of State.

That’s the point of all this. Isn’t it? A fugitive is standing in his lab, it’s his job to arrest her.

Tony picks up his coffee instead. Natasha has tilted her head, hasn’t reacted to his jibe although Tony’s long stopped expecting her to rise to his comments. Going on five years, he’s never gotten more than an arched brow out of her from the personals column.

“Tell me where Steve and Barnes are,” Natasha says; that way she has, painful and proper, asking mean questions the way other people ask, _Milk or cream?_

Tony flinches, pretends not to. Sips his coffee, stone cold, not enough sugar. He sneers at her cheaply.

“Is this where I tell you _I don’t know? _Let’s not pretend, shall we? You and the good Captain staged the jailbreak, we both know it. You ferried your merry troupe into Wakanda and now you’re living it up in Playpussy Mansion. I mean, I didn’t realise you guys needed actual princess towers in your palaces. You should’ve told me.”

“Ross –”

“Ross doesn’t know where you are and don’t even pretend you thought I’d tell him. Jesus, Romanov.”

Natasha looks neither appeased nor accusatory. She doesn’t confirm Tony’s suspicions, doesn’t deny them either.

Tony isn’t going to stoop to pleading his case. Either she’ll believe he’s not the biggest rat in New York, or she won’t. The only sound in the lab is the whirring of the machinery, faint and comforting.

Natasha nods an affirmative once, then looks down at her shoes. It’s less submissive than the gesture implies. If anything, she looks more like a parent summoning the strength to wrangle their screaming child.

Hot, defensive energy flutters outwards, all the way to Tony’s fingertips. Urges out words that have been sitting heavy on his tongue for almost a month.

“You know, T’Challa might have been a _bit _of a blindside, but I don’t know why I trusted you for a second. You were never going to stick around for a team that didn’t have your sweetheart _Barton _on it. Is he enjoying Wakanda’s many delights? I’ve got to say, I’m a little disappointed in him. Vacationing with his murderous boyfriend while his _daughter –”_

It happens very, very quickly.

One moment, Tony is full of vindictive relish, standing upright with his coffee in his hand and Natasha is in the doorway. The next, the coffee has smashed on the floor and there’s a thin, needle-like blade digging into the hollow of his throat.

One of his hands flicks out instinctively, and the suit is wrapping up his left hand instantly, all the way to his elbow. The white blue glare of the repulsor is bright and threatening, a centimetre from Natasha’s drawn, pale cheek.

“What did you do?” she asks, seemingly oblivious to the danger she’s in of losing half her face.

Tony’s back is bending over the worktop. Somehow, she’s got both his knees out from under him, his unweaponized hand trapped in her grip. It’s strange, having Natasha taller than him, leaning down into his eyeline. The thin skin of her eyelids is lilac with exhaustion.

Whatever tiny moment of victory he had felt at the mention of Barton’s offspring has vanished, leaving a hollow, terrible guilt that isn’t fair, that doesn’t _belong _there.

It _hurts. _It hurts, the jab of her blade, the jar of his spine, the twist of his knees, it all hurts. But what really, truly hurts, is that Natasha Romanov seems to honestly think he’s capable of harming an innocent girl. His teammate’s _daughter, _no less.

_Ex-_teammate, his ever so smart brain helpfully corrects.

“I got them _out,” _he snarls back, stung and strung. “Lucky for Barton, when Ross’ men were sent to raid his Midwestern paradise, I got there first. I found the mysterious _L._ Didn’t expect to find two _L_s.”

They sure hadn’t expected him to find them either. In another lifetime, perhaps, Tony would have high-fived Barton for having an ex who actually came suspiciously close to taking down Iron Man.

Well, close for a regular civilian.

“Where are they?” Natasha demands, unmoved and livid.

Some heat of his anger comes back. Her distrust, it hurts yes, but more than that, it’s so damn unfounded. He’s not the one charged with killing _innocents _in all this madness.

“Relocated,” he snarls through clenched teeth. “Out of sight, far away, nobodies. They’re both safe. I made sure of it.”

At least, _Pepper _had made sure of it. Her voice clipped and far away over the phone, her confusion and frustration a weapon against Tony’s frayed nerves but she’d done it. Of course she had. Laura Shipley, now the newest recruit to the West Coast branch of the Maria Stark Foundation, with the perks of a great pension, medical and a brand-new house overlooking the Pacific with plenty of room for her teenage daughter.

Tony lets out a shaky, less-than-confident breath. He can smell Natasha, the sweat of her clothes and the citrus of her hair. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen the pale green of her eyes so close up.

She would kill him, Tony knows it.

He’d thought, only a few short weeks ago, that Steve was going to kill him. It’s only now he realises, with fresh data to compare the results, that Steve was never going to kill him.

Natasha, though. _Natasha._

“Ross doesn’t know?”

“Ross doesn’t know a goddamn thing.”

The knife vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

Natasha lets go of Tony. She steps back off him, like an undeserved acquiescence. Tony reaches up to swipe at the stinging cut in the vulnerable dip of his throat. Blood smears over his fingers as he wipes it away, sharp as a droplet of sweat trickles over the slice.

Natasha looks – worse, somehow. Worse than before.

Worse than ever.

Tiredness has given way to a sort of reprehensible terror. She stands strong, and Tony leans against his worktop, and he says, “So, Barton _does _give a damn about his kid.”

Yeah, he can still rescue the guy’s family and be mad at the asshole.

Natasha, though. She doesn’t rise to it.

Going on five years, he’s never gotten more than an arched brow out of her from the personals column, but so much as hint at disrespecting Barton? Tony’s seen her bites come out for less.

She looks left, then. Looks directly at the east panelling, blasted open, Mark XLVII unmade and waiting, all of it but for the lower left arm which is now wrapped around Tony’s own. Behind it, _behind_ it. Round, strong, indestructibly so, and cannot be seen without picturing the man who should hold it.

Tony swallows dryly, wants to leap to his own defence but before he can, Natasha speaks.

“Barton and Rogers never made it to Wakanda.”

She says it quickly. The way Tony rattles off nightmares. The way Pepper had said, _I think this is for the best._

It’s fast enough that Tony almost misses the implications of it.

Natasha. She’s not tired. She’s terrified.

Fear just looks different on her.

“What?” Tony asks, because surely, surely he’s wrong, or she’s wrong. Preferably both.

Natasha crosses her arms over her chest, as defensive as he’s ever seen her.

“Steve went in alone. Their jet was shot down on the get-out. Wilson got the others but Steve and Clint were still inside when it was brought down. Either they’ve been taken prisoner, or they’re on the floor of the Atlantic somewhere.”

Tony hates her. He hates her tough demeanour, her dismissive voice. He hates how carefully she chooses her words, how easily she talks about them being fish food. Their team. Their friends.

Perhaps the last thing he’ll ever have said to Steve will be base treacherous lies, an accusation of his unworthiness that was little more than the reflection of the mirrors in Tony’s eyes.

And Clint, the last thing he said to Clint will be –

No. It can’t. _He _can’t.

Tony looks at Natasha. Takes in her bruised eyes, her gaunt face.

“You think Ross has them?”

A shrug. An actual _shrug._

“You thought I knew? That I had something to do with it?”

Another loose, apathetic shrug.

Tony, he’s floundering. He has no idea what he did to instil such absolute distrust in his teammates. Is this really how they saw him?

Does Natasha honestly think he would? Does Clint? Does _Steve? _Are they tied up in some dingy cell right now, getting the crap kicked out of them, thinking Tony instigated their suffering?

His eyes are blistering. His mouth is too wet, his throat too dry.

“If I believed you’d done it, I wouldn’t have asked.”

It’s unfair, unreasonable of her. The weight of a vibranium shield ramming super-strength into his chest.

Tony turns his back on her, pushes against the worktop edge with both hands, one bare and the other still plated red and gold. The white noise of his own panic wins out against the rational relief that, yes, of course she wouldn’t have asked, she’d have _acted._

She wouldn’t ask. Tony would just be dead.

“Ross wouldn’t tell me,” Tony says truthfully. The man hasn’t got enough proof to put Tony on the rack, but the man knows Tony’s about as loyal to him as he is to ice cream flavours.

Natasha seems indifferent to the slight plea of his tone, which goes some way to helping it be less embarrassing. She walks over to the adjacent worktop, hopping up lightly to sit on its edge. She smiles at Dum-E when he does a little swivel towards her.

“I’m not entirely sure Ross has them,” she says coolly.

She pats Dum-E’s base in an absent way that reminds Tony painfully of why he’s always liked her. There’s something about machines, they’ve always been more trustworthy than people, and he knows Natasha recognised that feeling in him, even back when her name was Natalie, and she was a hot body with a clipboard in his whisky soaked periphery.

It makes sense, her doubt. Maybe taking Barton would be worth the risk, or taking someone like Wanda. What’s the fallout of taking two international criminals hostage? An assassin and a witch – the public already want Wanda’s blood on the streets, and it would be child’s play for Ross to get Barton’s name re-uncleared.

But _Steve? _Out of public favour or not, he’s still Captain America. There’s weight in that, and Ross is risking big if something happens to Rogers.

“What are you thinking? Knock-off HYDRA? Another dastardly Sokovian grudge?”

Natasha tucks her hands on the worktop, fingers under her thighs, swinging her ankles too calmly for the circumstances. She’s working too hard to seem unworried. Tony doesn’t think he’s ever seen her have to _work _at it, before.

“Ross could still have tipped off any number of people.”

“He’s a man with clean hands,” Tony agrees. “Do you know where they are?”

Natasha’s eyes are on the Iron Man suit, hovering glazed over Tony’s shoulder.

“We’re working on it.”

“We?”

Tony wants – _needs – _to help get them back, he really does. But neither hell nor high water is going to convince him to launch a rescue operation alongside the Winter Soldier right now, no matter how much the guy wants his best bud and his bedwarmer back.

She reads his self-reproach easily and for the second time, generously ignores it.

“T’Challa is on standby. When we have co-ordinates, he’ll come. His bodyguard, too.”

“His bodyguard?”

“His bodyguard.”

The note of approval in Natasha’s voice is nothing if not terrifying.

Tony takes a deep breath, puffing out his cheeks as he rubs his knuckles against his brow. The pulse of a headache that’s been building for days has mellowed into a steady, photosensitive ache. He winces, thumbs his eyes and wills himself not to throw up on the floor.

He can still feel, when he closes his eyes, the crack of Steve’s shield deep in his sternum. He’s been trying not to torment himself wondering whether or not Steve remembered, while ramming the strongest metal on earth into his arc reactor, that Tony no longer needed it to stay alive.

Tony can feel his arms, his whole body, jittering. He tries to remove himself from the memory of Steve’s face turning away, of Clint’s hands on the barrier of his prison cell. The fright in his eyes when Tony leaned in close, to whisper through the glass, taunting, cruel as he’s ever been.

All he can picture, though, is Laura Shipley, her hands trembling around a handgun, screaming at her daughter to run, to hide, like Iron Man was some kind of threat, something to _fear. _Lila Shipley, with her dad’s eyes and her mom’s hair.

“Why ask me?”

_Shit. _That was not supposed to come flying out from between his fingers.

Natasha, empty slate of hard decisions. Her history’s written plainly in the smoothness of her eyes.

“Sam broke his arm in the crash. I don’t know Scott. Wanda’s powers are out of whack because your boss literally _collared _her. Barnes is the opposite of mission ready. And I haven’t finished training Pepper yet.”

A reluctant, choking laugh falls out of Tony, followed by something closer to a sob, which he gathers greedily back into his chest before tears can follow. _Pepper._ He needs her. He always needs her – why does he keep forgetting that until she goes away?

And who the _hell _is he to take comfort from the Black Widow, when her best friend, her partner, is missing-possibly-worse? God, he might be losing his mind with worry over Rhodey (and Rhodey’s spine and Rhodey’s legs and Rhodey’s mind and Rhodey’s life and Rhodey’s everything, Rhodey, shit, _Rhodey)_ but at least he knows where Rhodey is.

“You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy, Tony Stark,” Natasha says, low and sorrowful, like an apology.

Tony recoils from it like a blow.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” Her eyes are pitiful, pitying, some hybrid of the two. “You’re not angry about the Accords. You knew exactly what Steve would say to them. And you never once thought about blaming Clint for New York.”

Tony turns his back on her, feels flushed and childish but he can’t, can’t take it, can’t take her. Her blades are only half as lethal as the rest of her.

“You’re angry because Steve lied to you. Because he was going to keep lying to you.”

She’s always seen right through him. Not unlike Pepper, except, while Pepper always cuts through his bullshit and leaves him feeling seen, noticed, _loved, _Natasha looks right through him to his worst, lays it out in pages like blood splatters on the walls and then expects him not to get offended when she wrings him out to dry. He’s always known Barton’s made of tougher stuff than he ever lets on – nobody can withstand Natasha’s dressing downs the way he does.

Tony swallows, chokes, holds his breath like a screaming animal in his arms.

She just keeps _going._

“And Steve lied to you in the first place because he was afraid you’d react badly. Which you did. Steve underestimated you, which wasn’t fair. You underestimated him right back, Tony.”

There’s no warning before her hand snakes over his shoulder, and there’s no possible way of hiding his violent flinch in response. She squeezes once, a warning or a comfort. It’s always been pretty hard to tell the difference, coming from her.

“You can fix this.”

Contrary to what his last Time Magazine interview would suggest, Tony Stark has not fixed every single problem he’s ever come across. He’s accumulated failures like dust gathering on the crossbeam of an ageing house; every time he thinks about disturbing the wreckage, he’s left choking.

He doesn’t want to fix this. He wants it to _be fixed._ He wants the broken bone to heal, and heal right; he just doesn’t want to have to be the one to set it. Tony’s tired of fixing things. He’s tired of breaking them, too.

Only, this isn’t a machine, this isn’t a trusty engine he can keep turning over until it starts.

It’s _Steve. _It’s his team. And however much he wants to hate them for not trusting him, what he really wants, what he’s always fucking wanted, is just to prove that they can, that they should.

Twenty-five years without his shadow blocking out the sunlight, and Tony’s still Howard Stark’s disappointing son to the core.

Natasha’s hand slips away, leaving his shoulder colder for her absence.

“FRIDAY,” he says, his eyes on his suit.

“Yes, Boss?”

“We’re looking for Captain Rogers and Hawkeye. I’m going to hook you up to the sparkly new tracking system in the jet Natasha brought us to play with. Think you can take a peek for me?”

“It would be my pleasure, Boss.”

His smile feels weak, alien; Stark Family Christmas snap, 1982. There was a time, out of reach of his muscle memories, when he could slap a smile over his face as easy as an open palm, striking quick.

“Thanks, FRI.”

Over his shoulder, he opens his mouth to throw a neat little jibe, a practice swing, just to watch it roll off Natasha’s back, water on a duck. It vanishes from his lips before it can be voiced, when he sees her.

Natasha. Her expression, relief and desolation, like a gutted candle as she stares at Dum-E. Her mouth askew, twisted around all the words she won’t ever say.

He walks past her, out of the lab, out towards the jet.

*

Later, after they’ve fought and failed, he’ll regret a lot of things, but perhaps most of all, he’ll regret he didn’t just treat her like a human being, in that moment. Didn’t at least _try _to fold her up into a hug.

She’d probably have knifed him, anyway.

*

Except, maybe she wouldn’t have.

He’ll never know for sure.

*

When Tony woke up from heart surgery, the hole in his chest sewn up, the sunlight streamed through the window and Pepper was there. Rhodey, Happy. The people that mattered, his people, Tony’s.

Four days later, out of the danger zone, bored witless while that sunlight keeps on streaming.

“Goddamn idiot, Tony Stark. Goddamn fool.”

Clinton Francis Barton, holding a metallic purple heart helium balloon and a big teddy bear under his arm.

“What are you doing here?” Tony demands and Clint rolls his eyes, tying the balloon to Tony’s bedframe and tucking the bear in next to him.

“Woulda come sooner, but I was a bit tied up,” which is almost certainly an opaque and genuine statement.

There are braces around both of his wrists.

“You’re just here for my physiotherapists,” Tony says, pulling the teddy bear under his arm. Cheap material, bristly, like it’s been pulled straight out of a carnival lucky dip.

“Damn right,” Clint replies, taking the seat Rhodey spent all yesterday occupying. He props his feet up on the bed and produces a mysterious_ TMZ _magazine from somewhere. “You will _not _believe what the Kardashians are up to these days. Puts Dog Cops to shame. Sergeant Whiskers would be scandalised.”

“Stop hating on Khloé,” Tony groans, settling back into his pillows and closing his eyes, the empty space where the shrapnel should be raw and hurting.

Clint’s eyes, tracking him between pages about sex tips and Madonna’s twentieth adoption.

“Tony,” he says, and Tony grunts. Peeks through his lashes to see that bullet void glare. Feels like he should flinch but it just makes him feel safe, safer than he’s felt in a long while. Safe as damn houses. Clint sighs, quiet as his kills. “Any one of us would’ve been here.”

Tony looks away, biting the edges of his tongue until the sting is worse than his eyes.

When Clint’s fingers brush his inner elbow, he doesn’t bother hiding the flinch. Clint holds on anyhow, doesn’t back down, or stop glaring. Doesn’t stop reading him the Twelve Tricks To Teach Your Boyfriend from the glossy pages in his lap, either.

*

Here’s where they really end up.

Home birth, against every particle of Tony’s sensibilities. Pepper’s eyes shining and her body trembling and her heart singing, that cry, that first cry, that infant’s wail, the same every time until now. This one, this infant, unique.

Theirs.

Tony kisses his wife, his only prayer. Holds this tiny miracle in his disastrous arms and promises her whatever scraps of the world he can salvage from this wreck he helped make of it. His little girl, his heart in his hands for her, a meagre offering but he’ll keep on giving it anyway, will give it again and again.

Then, eighteen days later.

Eighteen days after Pepper looks at him with those big bright eyes, whispers, _she’s coming, _and smiles like the sun. Eighteen days after.

Tony sits on the veranda of their sanctuary, pre-dawn. Mist on the water, dragonflies flashing blue emeralds, skimming in flickers, disturbing the glassy surface. The trees looming tall in the half-dark, reflected by the lake. He makes the call. Inside, they sleep, his prayer and his heart, together, curled in the middle of their bed.

It rings for a long time, long enough for Tony to talk himself into and out of it twice over, twice over before –

_“Tony? Hi.”_

It’s been months since they’ve spoken. Doesn’t come close to their records but he’s caught unawares all the same.

He sounds breathless, like he’s been running. Only, he’s never breathless when he runs. His lungs are too strong for that. All of him, too strong by half.

“Hi,” Tony says, reserved. He’s forgotten why this was so important, ten seconds ago.

Steve waits a while, longer than Tony would in reverse. Waits, and then:

_“Tony? Are you – is everything ok?”_

“Yes,” Tony replies, sincere, more sincere than he was last time. Breathless, too, like he’s been running. “I.” Musters it, summons it like courage. “I have a daughter.”

He could live a thousand years, learn every language in the universe, and he will probably never figure out how to interpret the sound Steve makes, then. All vowels and vocal chords. Animal, infant, air.

_“Wow,” _Steve says. Almost sounds as if he invented it. _“Wow, Tony. That’s. That’s wonderful. I’m – are mother and baby doing OK?”_

“Perfect. They’re perfect.”

_“That’s really wonderful, Tony.”_

Steven Grant Rogers, still meaning every word he says. _That’s wonderful, _and it sounds it, and it is. Tony realises, belated, berated, that maybe this is a form of bragging he doesn’t own the rights to. Steve, who doesn’t sound envious, doesn’t sound jealous or covetous, none of those nasty things that breed inside the Stark genes.

He just sounds happy, really happy. For Tony.

For _Tony._

_“And is the father doing OK?”_

The question shouldn’t be a surprise. Somehow, though.

Tony laughs, and the windy water catches it, carries it to the elms across the lake. He pulls the afghan tighter around his shoulders. Pepper’s first, not very good, his favourite. Grubby with his fingertips, worn through in less than six months.

“I…”

Tony takes a breath, careful, hoping it doesn’t come off as a sigh down the phone. On the other end of the line, a whisper of something a lot like laughter in return.

_“What’s her name?”_ Steve asks and already, already Tony’s conditioned to smile, even as the letters grace his lips.

“Morgan,” he says, nothing more beautiful, nothing more graceful, nothing more true.

He loves her more every time he looks at her, every time he says her name.

_“Beautiful,”_ Steve comments.

“She is.”

Does he know? Perhaps he does. Because he waits, keeps waiting. Lets Tony breathe in and out, three, seven times.

Patient, patient like a sniper in a nest.

“Did you know Hawkeye had a daughter?”

It falls out of him, collateral damage. Sucking in a lungful of resentment and despair. His arms feel empty without his child, breaking the phone, ripping the afghan, just at the want of her closeness. Tony could never have guessed this is what it would be like.

And Steve, across the line, across state lines. Their unspoken pact ripped open.

_“Yes,”_ he says, says it like he wishes he didn’t. _“He told me. In the bunker.”_

Tony does not wonder what else Hawkeye told Steve, in that bunker. Does not wonder what secrets were spilled out of him while the dark caved inwards and the cold dug under their skin. Has not thought about it, across the years, has not imagined it in his head, replayed the fiction like a vision unbidden behind his eyes.

“Her name was Lila. She vanished, when Thanos. Her and her mom.”

Maybe he thought about it, for a second or more. Just a suggestion, just to consider, but he couldn’t, can’t, cannot. It’s not his right.

_Morgan, _like Pepper’s Uncle, his heart beating in his cupped hands.

_“Yeah,” _Steve says, unsurprised. _“Nat was real torn up about it.”_

Tony thinks about asking if it’s up to Steve to go tattle-taleing on _Nat, _these days but, well. Who else is up to the task?

He left her mug in the Avengers Base, in the cupboard with a bunch of random assortments. The one she brought with her, along with her weapons and her tac gear and her fucking necklace, all those years ago. When Tony grabbed them like collector’s cards.

_Nat _probably wouldn’t like Steve tattle-taleing, no matter if it’s his job nowadays or not.

Anyhow. Tony’s seen _Nat _torn up. Seen it with his own two eyes. He doubts she’d ever let it happen again, not even for another Barton.

_“Tony,” _Steve murmurs, that Captaincy on his tongue ringing through the phone. Tony sinks in his seat under its weight, cold nose and cold ears, cold chin, frozen eyelashes. _“What’s going on?”_

Tony could tell him. Wouldn’t make a difference now, they’re all gone. Wiped clean like a slate, all they’ll ever amount to. All anybody is. Slates, to be wiped clean. Anybody except Morgan, that is. Unique, theirs.

He could tell Steve. Could tell him about the phone call to backass Iowa, about Ross’ trace on their comms and Tony’s lies, his race to that lonely farm, just in time to find it burning. How he found those two _Ls. _Tony, begging their ears, begging their faith.

_Please, let me help you. The people looking for Clint – for Barnes – they won’t spare you. Please._

_Lila, _Laura Shipley had said, a mother’s voice. The same way Pepper might sound, maybe, _Morgan _in her mouth, a prayer of her own.

Tony could tell Steve all of it. He could Steve about the Raft, about Barton’s eyes wide and terrified through the barriers, about his anger, words lashing out hard and Tony, his impulses running riot, hitting back too hard.

Tony could tell him.

“Just keeping you up to speed, Cap.”

He could, but he won’t. Not today.

Those are not words for a peaceful pre-dawn, grey light reflecting over the still water. Wind in the grasses and inside, so close, all the pieces of Tony’s fractured world made whole, curled sleepy in their bed.

Those words, they belong to another day. A darker day, when Tony’s heart isn’t full, when Tony isn’t so _full._

_“OK, Tony,” _Steve says in a voice of disbelief suspended, light in the air refracted. _“Tell Pepper, congratulations. I’m happy for you. All three of you.”_

All three, yes, _yes, _that’s what they are. They are a unit, now, no longer a pair. All three.

Tony smiles, and he thinks Steve might be smiling, too. Smiling all that hurt into the world, Tony gets it, now. He gets it. His dad’s bewildered expression, looking at him like he wants to ask, _Why?_

He ends the call before it can spill out of him.

*

_I guess you’re on the wrong – _he says, dry as the corn in his voice, aching like snapped hamstrings.

Eyes that stare like a bullet in a void.

Tony’s used to it.

Well, he was, once.

*

_(You’re a self-fulfilling prophecy, Tony Stark.)_

*

Tony is twenty-four years old the first time somebody calls him the Merchant of Death to his face.

A hippy-nostalgic wannabe, dressed like she wants nothing more than for the Vietnam War to start up again, just so she can protest it. She writes it on a placard in fiery caution red that she holds up as she stands amidst the rabble behind the press, while Obadiah Stane announces the parameters of the new SI contracts with the US air force, the radical advancements thanks to _Our main man, Tony._

The woman just stands there, holding her sign, her bubblegum pink hair half covered by her hat; her lipstick purple and her ears over-pierced. She looks sad, wet-eyed and her mouth twisted lemony around the things she doesn’t say.

When Tony accidentally makes eye contact with her, she grins a mean, shark-like grin and he smirks back indulgently, mockingly.

It’s his mom’s birthday.

*

The signal is faint, but they fly true to it. Tony and Natasha in one jet; T’Challa and his bodyguard, the tall and fearsome Okoye, in another.

Back in Wakanda, Sam Wilson monitors their movements. Keeps his eyes on Scott Lang and Wanda Maximoff like he’s being paid by the hour.

God alone knows what James Barnes is doing, other than losing whatever scraps of his mind he’s clawed back so far.

They fly true, north and east, and it takes no time at all, for all the trouble finding it had caused.

God bless America, and his Captain.

Storm it like Austria, 1943, that dinner table talk that kept him up at night.

It’s over too quick.

It’s _over._

*

“Allow me,” T’Challa says, kindly, kingly.

Takes the reins of his billion horse power jet, which doesn’t need a single piece of fixing, whatever invented flaws Tony could find.

Tony inclines his head, a silent acquiescence, the kind Rhodey would probably commit treason for from his best friend. Tony packs that thought away with all the other parts of Rhodey that he doesn’t have space for in his big stupid brain. It hurts, to be far away.

It hurts to be here, sitting next to a man who will be king, who’s wearing a catsuit that ripples purple in the light.

Barton will get a kick out of that one.

_Would have,_ his mind corrects, a war of fury raging, in the encroaching dawn.

*

Tony flies back in one jet, co-pilot to T’Challa, and maybe it’s the first time he willingly relinquishes the top spot.

The other jet is still on the ground. The women will follow.

(They landed, and Natasha Romanov, a folklore figurine. The Black Widow in her place, deadly as her million dollar unsmile.)

It’s not until they reach Wakanda that Tony realizes why he had been willing to relinquish the pilot’s seat so readily when the swap was offered. He’s not entirely certain he’d have been able to force himself to land, if it had been left up to him.

T’Challa shares none of his qualms, and before Tony can do more than jam up his speeding thoughts with an incredibly debilitating _The Winter Soldier is down there, _T’Challa brings the jet down to a smooth landing on the nearest pad.

It’s bright outside.

Even through the tinted jet windows, Wakanda is an assault of colour and sunshine, so desperately unlike the place they’d left behind that Tony feels his throat go dry.

The purring engine stops, the familiar comfort of it stolen away, as together, Tony and T’Chlla stare out of the glass to the seven people standing a short distance away from the jet’s nose.

Five of them Tony doesn’t recognize, and he can only assume they are doctors or doctors or maybe at the very least well-trained vets. One, he recognizes from a press photograph as the late King T’Chaka’s wife, T’Challa’s mother, austere and commanding and beautiful.

The seventh, though. The _seventh._

It’s Bucky Barnes.

Tony’s teeth are sharp on the edges of his tongue. He expects some instinct to work through him, expects rage or hurt, expects _something, _and it’s there, a flicker of feeling, only it’s so fleeting, it’s muted, or diverted, or overturned. As if he’s used up his quota of rage for the year. Maybe even the decade.

Whatever the case may be, he can’t conjure the impetus that had driven him to strike a month ago in Siberia, because he was wrong. Up there, as they came to land, he was _wrong._

That’s not the Winter Soldier. That’s not a HYDRA puppet, or even an ex-puppet. That’s one hundred percent, bona fide, Brooklyn bred James Buchanan Barnes, his one remaining arm held stiffly at his side, his face tight with a scowl as easy to read as Tony thinks his own must be.

That’s Bucky Barnes, and he’s _scared._

Tony remembers the Raft. A month ago, a lifetime. He remembers Hawkeye’s hands on the barrier between them, the ferocity in his eyes. Even in a cage, his body had exuded the power of its own limitations, corded muscle that could pull a draw weight Tony wouldn’t dare try without his suit, hands that were deft, trained to kill and had done countless times.

Now, that broad, powerful _human _shape is mangled, unrecognizable, and Tony realizes in that moment that, whatever his true feelings towards Barnes are, however much he might want to go another round, his next mission is very simple and very important.

Barnes cannot be allowed to see Barton’s body.

With this new thought taking up all the space of his oxygen, Tony turns to see T’Challa is watching him, measuring him.

Tony bristles, however deserved it might be.

“I will see what I can do to persuade Sergeant Barnes to return inside,” T’Challa says.

Tony nods, swallowing.

“Good idea,” he says, the words tickling his throat. “Probably best the Fist of HYDRA and I don’t cross paths. He seems like a grudge bearer.”

T’Challa doesn’t want for him to stop speaking of his own volition, which is probably for the best, because Tony honestly doesn’t think he would be able to. Instead, T’Challa gets up, exiting the jet through a small side hatch, which lets in a blast of hot air when it opens, making Tony shiver.

He watches Barnes straighten up at the sight of T’Challa, glancing immediately back to the jet, as if expecting more to follow.

It’s painful, physically painful, the way Barnes’ face scrunches up further when nobody does.

T’Challa greets his mother first, and addresses the doctors – the _doctors, _Christ, but one of the women, she’s more like a girl, she’s so _young _– and there’s a deliberate scattering, some back inside and others towards the jet, although nobody steps inside yet. They seem to be waiting for some final signal.

Eventually, there’s only Barnes standing in front of T’Challa, who still has his comms on, whose voice is loud and clear in Tony’s ear as he says,

_“Sergeant Barnes, would you accompany me inside?”_

Barnes rears back, all shoulders and chin.

_“Why?”_ he asks, hard, even more New York in his tone than Tony had prepared himself for. _“Where are they?”_

T’Challa inclines his head.

The doctors still haven’t come inside, but the youngest of them, the girl, the _girl, _pretty and angular and sharp eyed, is standing in the doorway of the hatch, watching as closely as Tony.

_“Captain Rogers is sedated,”_ T’Challa says, very calmly, and Tony can’t decide if he admires the man’s self-control or loathes it. _“His wounds have already started to heal.”_

There’s a deliberate, terrible hesitation, after that.

Through the comms, fainter than T’Challa’s voice but uncomfortably clear, Barnes asks: _“Clint?”_

A powerful beast tears through Tony’s guts. A small word, soft in a hard mouth. Frightened, because he’s still young, _Christ _even now, somehow, in spite of everything, or perhaps because of it, Barnes is still _young._

T’Challa says, _“We were too late to save him.”_

It’s as good a line as any, Tony concedes. Better than anything he’d have come up with.

Barnes’ face is bone white, marred with wide eyed disbelief.

Tony expects him to start shouting, throw in a good few punches. Hell, Tony has no idea the damage he would inflict in Barnes’ place.

Barnes doesn’t do any of that, though. He doesn’t do anything.

He just looks back at the jet, waiting. It’s almost as if he’s expecting Barton to walk out anyway, grinning and shrugging, his quiver strapped to his back and Tony, he’s never been a Godly kind of guy, but he knows a prayer when he sees one. It’s written like scripture in the lines of Barnes’ brow.

_“Please, Sergeant Barnes, come inside,”_ T’Challa says, as if it is at all acceptable for a King to beg.

_“Why?”_ Barnes asks. A crack of a word, the word of a child, the word of an unspoken, unquantifiable terror.

Tony watches T’Challa reach out, place a carefully strong hand on Barnes’ right shoulder.

Quieter, so gentle Tony flinches at the caress of his cushioned consonants, T’Challa says to Barnes: _“Because I wish to spare you pain.”_

The youngest of the women, pinched face wary, steps into the jet, followed by an older man. Their eyes are graves of regret, lingering on Tony, who wordlessly gestures them to the ice box tail of the jet. He can’t bring himself to go back there again. To see those faces, that face and a half.

When he looks back out the front, Barnes is on his knees.

*

_I guess you’re on the wrong side of history after all, _he said, and Tony bled to hear it.

*

“OK, absolutely not. _What? _No. Tony, Jesus. I mean, Jesus.”

Barton doesn’t even try to stifle his derision into something a little softer.

“Why not?” Tony demands from the other side of the hologram.

He knows exactly why.

“I’m _insulted, _Tony. Insulted.”

Clint’s indignation is normally hard to take seriously when he’s doing handstands, because his face gets all flushed and his voice starts to go up an octave after a while. Somehow, today, he’s sincere enough that even when he takes four hand-steps closer, his legs bending to compensate, he still actually sounds kind of believable.

“I’m trying help!” Tony says, pointing at his truly exquisite diagram but before he can do more than expand the hologram and just _show _Barton how magnificent it actually is –

“My _aim!” _Clint shout-scowls, neatly springing to flip off the worktop and onto the floor, where he plants his hands on his hips like teapot handles and exclaims very loudly: “You are trying to help my aim!”

In Tony’s defence, it’s an incredibly useful help.

“I don’t see why a few fail safes –”

“Tony, no, _Tony,” _Clint says and he braces his hands on the board between them, leaning into it with a red face and flashing eyes and is he _flexing _right now?

Tony refuses to be intimidated.

“The day I start making suggestion for your suit –”

“You literally suggested something yesterday.”

“Air bags!” Clint shouts, throwing his hands up into the air and flapping them around like a chicken attempting flight. “Invest in them! I got more bruises from you catching me than I would the ground!”

Tony very wisely refrains from pointing out that the ground would not give Barton bruises, it would break every bone in his body, pointedly ignoring the way Clint rubs his ribs to emphasise his point. They’re not even bruised, and Tony totally saved the idiot’s life.

“So you can suggest _padding _but I –”

“Yes, I can,” Clint sniffs, swinging up to sit on the worktop again. “Because I am directly suffering as a result of your lack of padding. You are not suffering because of my aim – because my aim is perfect!”

_Suffering. _Tony has personally witnessed this man escaping SHIELD Medical with a grade three concussion.

“It’s just a precaution.”

“I will precaution your ass,” Clint snips even as he smirks, reaching over to prod at a toolbox just to be spiteful. He knows about touching the toolboxes.

“Fun as that sounds –”

“Fix the grip, Tony, and nothing else” Clint tells him. “Or I’ll just go back to making them myself.”

“Ha,” Tony scoffs. “Yeah.”

He turns back to the bow he had, in all fairness, agreed to repair. So what if he wants to make some adjustments? He is a genius. Who refuses a genius’ updates on their medieval technology? Chris, he’s even pissier than he was about his hearing aids.

When Tony turns back, bow in hand and pretending to shoot without actually drawing it – he has a healthy relationship with his triceps than does not need testing, _thank you very much_ – it’s to see Clint’s grumpiest face yet glaring at him.

“Excuse me?”

Tony, releasing his pretend arrow, raises his eyebrows when Clint pretend catches it and pretend snaps it in half.

“You’re serious,” he says with dawning realisation. “You make these yourself?”

“How else do you think I got by before SHIELD? I did what I could with materials I could buy. Had a couple of contacts who could help when I needed it.”

It’s one of those markers for Clint, Tony has come to realise quickly. _Before SHIELD. _A little like how he has _Before Afghanistan. _A little like his _Before Pepper, _too.

Clint picks up an allen key, which is one of the safer things he could be fiddling with so Tony doesn’t bother telling him to put it down. He flicks it around his fingers seemingly without realising he’s doing it, twirling it with enviable dexterity.

“There’s no way you learned how to make the mother of bow and arrows at school,” is all he can think to say.

“Tony, the last thing I learned to do at school was my nine times tables.”

“Can you?” Tony asks, reflex, same as Clint’s laugh.

“Fuck you,” Clint chuckles. “I learned at the circus, like _all_ my best skills.”

Tony waits before responding to that one, because there are demons down that road. It’s a statement worth unpacking, or would be, if Tony were the therapist kind. Thing is, Clint leaves these little tests lying around all over and Tony’s gotten pretty good at passing them.

He picks up on things and he ignores things; they speak a shared language, not unlike the easy slip of science-speak with Bruce.

Clint’s right hand goes to his left forearm, where it often does when he mentions the circus, at least when he’s down here. His fingers tuck over the leather strap he keeps tight beneath his elbow. Tony’s only ever seen it off him when he’s going on missions that require undercover work.

He looks at it, longer than he normally would, holding Clint’s bow in his both hands. It’s heavier than it could be.

Really, Clint should just let him make a whole new arsenal, it would be so much easier.

Staring at the leather tied around Clint’s arm, recognising the safe action of his touch to it, like the sign of the cross over a sinner’s brow, Tony asks: “Heirloom?”

Clint looks down at his arm, sliding his hand over to cover it completely, feeling its presence.

“Nah,” he says, far more nonchalant than he means. “This? Gift. From a…guardian angel.”

The dark of his eyes does not match the lightness of his voice. Whoever gave him that strap, they were _somebody. _Whatever that strap meant once, it means more now. That’s how it often is, with gifts. They accumulate worth over time and distance. This leather is rich looking, thick and worn.

“What?” Clint asks to Tony’s responding shrug.

“Just trying to get a read on you.”

Honesty, he’s heard, is the best of policies.

“Me? I’m an open book.”

Tony doesn’t quite indulge it, though it’s not all a lie. Clint _is _an open book, in a way. It’s just a shame that book is mostly fiction, a performance to be enjoyed and admired.

“Sure,” Tony says, sliding away the holograph of his suggestions for the bow and putting the actual model in the centre of the board for a proper scan. “Written in hieroglyphics.”

“Huh,” Clint says, thoughtful, scooting up on the worktops and digging his hands underneath him to swing back into his handstand. Even with his back to him, Tony can hear his smirk. “Those the little pictures that the ancient Greeks used to draw?”

Tony rolls his eyes and refuses to rise to the bait.

“Yeah,” he says. “Are you going to help me fix your weapon or are you going to practice your circus skills, Merida?”

In response, Clint lifts one hand off the worktop and balances like a starfish.

His voice is a note higher as he mutters, just loud enough to be heard: “Nine. Eighteen. Twenty-seven. Thirty-five.”

Tony throws another allen key at him.

He catches it, of course, but it shuts him up all the same.

*

When the world ends, they’ve got this holoboard up, skimming through the dead like a memorial.

Tony watches it for an hour or more, clinging greedy to every name. Wakes up wretched to Pepper’s hands and Steve Rogers in the corner and there, right there, in Steve’s hands: a rich, thick, dark band of leather.

He’d never thought to wonder where it had gone before.

_Heirloom, _he thinks, gloomy. Then he sends Steve away.

*

When the world ends, Tony Stark’s best luck runs thin, but not out.

Happy’s gone. Pep’s mom and aunt, and one of her nephews. Peter Parker.

Only, Tony’s still here. So’s Pepper, and Rhodey. He can’t take that for granted.

*

So, the world. It ends, and it doesn’t. Cut in half.

Tony stumbles out of the ship, three weeks after. Vertigo and sea legs. Or maybe that’s space legs.

He feels hollow, wasted out. His knees ache to sink to the green grass of Mother Earth as they buckle inwards. Before they can, though, he’s caught by a familiar pair of hands.

The flinch is instinct, the push-pull of touch-starved and terrified but that _voice. _That spooked-horse shushing, that gentle encouragement, it smacks him around the face.

Tony stumbles out of the ship and Steve Rogers catches him.

It’s been a year and a half, maybe. Since that day. Since Wakanda, since the hospital.

Since Tony had blasted his way through four-inch steel to find Captain America chained to a wall, talking hoarse nonsense to a corpse.

Now, Steve catches Tony as he stumbles, looks him in the eye with those sad baby blues, and every fragment of self-defence crumbles to dust, along with Tony’s heart.

Steve’s got an arm around him, holding him up with that bottled all-American strength, takes most of his weight like it’s no burden, and Tony is torn between collapse and a vice grip on his shirt, the question on his tongue burning holes in his mouth.

_Pepper. Pepper. Pepper._

First thought, last word.

Steve turns him, bodily. Steps aside to reveal her.

_Pepper._

Her perfect sleepless face, the crush of her hands, her mouth, the thrum of her heartbeat against his own. She’s soft and strong in his hands and he’s violently afraid of how she could just vanish at any moment.

Steve stands close, as if he might catch them both, might catch the whole world when it topples.

Only it _did, _and he _didn’t._

Tony had thought his faith in Steve Rogers had vanished, a year and a half ago. He thought his rage and grief had eclipsed that faith, that belief, that trust.

Yet, stumbling off a ship and into Steve’s hands, standing on a half-world with Pep holding him up and an empty space at his side, that a part of him, that naïve seedling untreated, had held out hope, all this time. Hope that Steve would save them, that he’d have a plan.

It’s a delusion.

It hurts, being wrong.

It _hurts._

*

_What changed your mind, really? _Clint asked once, legs swinging on the worktop. _Wasn’t this. This would’ve been your best yet._

His bullet eyes on the arc reactor, unpieced holographic in front of him.

Tony, confused, then embarrassed, then annoyed. Found in this man a lot of fragments of his boyhood, ghosting him.

_I didn’t want – _he replied, stop-start shame. Held his breath and spoke it like a spell. _I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of history._

Clint’s face, that poker face like a slap, broken apart at the mask seams to reveal bewilderment.

_You’re not, _he scoffed, as if the very notion were a laughable thing.

Ain’t that a thought?

_Tony, _he said, insistent, tugging at the band of leather around his arm, his guardian angel gift. _Tony, you’re not. And neither was your dad._

Clint Barton, that guy. Bleeding kindness from stones.

Tony showed him the arc reactor, and then he built him two. Two tiny ones, miniature, tucked into grey and violent shells that could slot discreetly into his ear canals.

_No more shoddy back-ups, Legolas, _he said, loud and proud, and Clint, for all his grumpy-cat hospital routine, had exploded with irrepressible glee.

*

_He was kind, _his dad used to say, confused, disbelieving.

Kindness, it comes natural to some.

Virginia Potts has got kindness in her bones. She teaches him, teaches him a whole lot of things.

She teaches him, his air when he can’t breathe, his eyes when he can’t see.

_I’m in Wakanda, _he says, secure line holding, her voice feathered across the ocean.

_Are you safe? _She asks and he tells her _yes, _but that turns out not to be quite true. Comes home hurting worse than he did before, not a scratch on him, not a mark show for his pains.

*

They land, and T’Challa steps outside, and his doctors step inside and he says _to spare you pain _like it’s even possible and Tony.

Tony gets out of the jet.

Despite every squealing protest of his instincts, self-preservation and otherwise, he doesn’t wear the suit.

Wakanda is scorching; he feels an instant prickle of sweat form under the collar of his shirt and down the column of his spine. His tongue is dry, much too big between his teeth.

T’Challa is standing close, having given up trying to move the man on his knees, who has been silent now for several minutes. That final _Why _has split apart the atmosphere, destructive in its smallness, and in his.

Barnes’ face, hidden by the curtain of his dark hair. He looks up at Tony’s approach.

It would seem not even heartbreak can dull his senses.

If Barnes’ first thought is to attack at the sight of Tony, he hides it terrifyingly well. Barnes looks up at him with the kind of emptiness that makes the Winter Soldier seem all too close to the surface of his thoughts. This, this is the face of a man who has killed, who might in fact be dead, too.

Tony takes another deliberate step towards him, does his level best not to react to the dull blue eyes darting up and down him, no doubt finding him a minimal threat.

He hasn’t learned, never had the chance to. He doesn’t know that Tony’s just as dangerous out of his Iron Man suit as he is in it. _Maybe more so,_ he thinks with some bitterness.

Tony ignores the insult of Barnes’ assumption easily, distracted as he musters what strength can be found in two tiny broken arc reactors that have been sitting in his loose palm, crushed beyond all repair.

“Walk away, Barnes.”

Barnes doesn’t so much as blink, not at Tony’s order, not at his approach. Not at anything until Tony holds a hand out, visibly indicating he’s offering something.

(Tony, see, he doesn’t like being handed things and he’s not all that fond of handing things to other people, either, but there are exceptions to every rule other than the Grim Reaper’s, and this, this is one of them.)

Mistrusting, a forceful jut to his jaw that denies a flinch, Barnes raises a cupped hand – his right, of course, Tony hides his grimace – and lets Tony drop the ruined crumples of his own design into his palm.

The hearing aids look somehow even smaller in Barnes’ hand. As he stares down at them, there’s no mistaking the wet glaze of his eyes, the way his fingers tremble as they close over the little lumps of violet and grey. His mouth opens, an alarming wobble at the corners and he looks up, looks at Tony, _to _Tony, to say something, maybe dark gratitude or harsh judgement.

To say what, Tony never finds out.

Barnes looks up, and before he can find Tony’s face, his gaze catches on something behind Tony instead.

In a toppling flash, Barnes _lunges._

He’s off point, unused to the imbalance of one arm, distracted by the already second-nature instinct to _not drop the aids, _and this momentary confusion is probably the only reason that when Tony leaps in his path, instead of barrelling like a tank right through him, Barnes actually stumbles.

It’s only a few seconds, a few quickening heartbeats. It’s enough.

Enough for Barnes’ harsh, broken voice to scream _“CLINT!” _in Tony’s ear, enough for Tony to throw his arms out, the summoned suit slapping itself with bruising force around his body.

Enough for T’Challa to step in the way, obstructing whatever view has dragged Barnes from his stupor. Enough for Barnes’ knees to buckle under him as an inhuman sound tears out of his mouth, his closed fist reaching wildly over Tony’s shoulder.

Tony, suit snapped into place, doesn’t hesitate.

He’s got Barnes by the waist in a scooping moment of panic and is immediately soaring, up and out, high and far, far away from the landing pad, away from Steve’s unconscious body and far, far away from Clint’s mangled corpse.

Even without his titanium add-on, Barnes is alarmingly strong.

He writhes viciously against Tony’s tenuous grip but the shock, the shock of being airborne, of being grabbed by hard metal, of seeing something he should never have had to see, weakens him enough that Tony gets him far out, out enough that when Barnes’ fist actually does make some kind of impact on his ribs and they roll through the air, they hit the ground in a wide, empty field.

_“No – no – Clint – no – let – no – no – Cl – no –”_

Barnes is manic, incoherent as Tony lets him drop and he’s on his knees, his hand and head bending low to the ground, curling under the weight of his own bellowing. Caves into it, hoarse and horrible; he’s shaking all over.

Tony doesn’t get out of the suit this time.

He folds in a clink of red and gold, his faceplate flipped up, until he’s sitting on the ground.

The sun is punishing over his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. His chest feels tight, like somebody opened it back up when he wasn’t looking. He tries hard to keep hold of his own anger, the pain that’s kept him awake, kept him _alive, _for the past four weeks.

It’s like water in his hands. Like the cling of leaves to winter trees.

This man killed his parents, it’s true. But he’s also a man who has lost something that, in his place, Tony thinks he’d probably kill everyone’s parents to get back.

Tony sits in the baking sun, his heart in his mouth, his breath toxic in his lungs, and listens to Bucky Barnes, that kind man his father used to know, tearing up his grief into the grass beside him.

*

Clint, through the barrier, mouth of thorns. Staring like a bullet in a void.

“I guess you’re on the wrong side of history after all, Stark,” he says, and he smiles at himself, and his own precision. Knows how deep a cut he’s struck, the perfection of his aim.

Tony, recoiling from the blow, from a man who bleeds kindness from stones whetting his cruelty on Tony so easy, so quiet, a secret for only them to share. He reacts with all the unkindness that lives inside his genes, so treacherous.

Tony, leaning into the barrier, tilting his head close, easy, murmuring like a threat he couldn’t possibly mean: “On the right side of these bars, though. I’ll send Lila your regards, shall I?”

*

Clint, bellowing his name through the bars, bellowing _I will kill you Stark _and meaning it. Meaning every word.

*

The signal is faint, but they follow it to the end, to point zero. The signal is faint, but they make do because they must. Follow it along the coastline north. It’s faint, steady, there. Taunting them with its closeness.

Tony, in his suit, pouring his nerves out of the jet and behind him, the Black Widow. Precisely one abandoned building, a quarter mile out. They hop to it, followed by two spectres, their own landing silent, too. Invisible but for the disturbance of the grasses.

“FRIDAY’s got us linked,” Tony says, snapping his faceplate into place. “I’m going in.”

Doesn’t wait for permission, doesn’t have to. The only person whose orders he’s ever really followed is a quarter mile north-east from this spot, deep underground.

“We’ll join you, Mister Stark,” T’Challa says, his own suit glittering into the camouflage of the closely pressing night.

Tony engages the repulsors, a shrill rush of sound; soars into the darkness. To their Captain, to their Hawk.

*

_I’m exposed, like a nerve, it’s a nightmare, _Bruce says of the Hulk, the day they meet.

When he takes a handful of offered blueberries, he does it after a head tilt, a pause; surprised and Tony is willing to bet quite pleased, too.

He comes to Stark Tower, that is swiftly the Avengers Tower, and Tony vacillates between nought and two thousand, dizzy with the effort.

Bruce is the best of them, perhaps. Exposes the raw nerve of his existence and carries the burden of consequence on vulnerably human shoulders. Doesn’t have money to throw at it like Tony, isn’t a god or a national icon to be adored. Doesn’t have the mask of an assassin to cover his sins, shoved under like dust beneath a rug.

“We haven’t caught up in a spell,” Tony tells him, crestfallen, all those years after.

“Broke up? What like, like a band?” Bruce scoffs.

It sounds worse, coming from him. Bruce, who survived loss with grace, devastation with empathy. He can’t comprehend an evil great enough to split Earth’s Mightiest Heroes into fractures.

Bruce tells Tony, “Call him.”

“It’s not that simple,” Tony throws back.

_Excuses, excuses, _a voice deep in Tony’s subconscious replies. Voice of corn, brassy, taking no shit. Voice of a conscience unchecked.

“We lost one,” he says, accidental.

He can feel Stephen Strange’s eyes on the back of his neck. It’s always the Steves, isn’t it? Gut him from the root like a weed.

“Nat?” Bruce asks, first thought, faithful. _Damn._

Tony’s face must say what his mouth never could, because Bruce’s panic tips sideways, shoulders bent. Grief exposed, like a nerve, like a nightmare.

“Clint.”

Tony looks back, over his shoulder. Looks at _Doctor Strange, _wizard boy wonder. God, Clint would’ve hated him, Tony knows it in his bones.

Strange gives him this look, uninterpretable.

And again, later, as he mutters, breathless: _It was the only way._

*

They storm the bunker like it’s Austria 1943.

Tony first, burrowing down into the earth, into the pit below. Gets through six armed guards and finds a control room cluttered. All the cameras flashing snowstorm, a wall of fuzzy screens. They’re already moving out.

Tony ignores the alarm in his guts, even louder than the one ringing through the room. Moving _out._

Are they even still here?

_“I’m on the north west entry,” _Widow says over the comms. _“Four guards down. Taking the perimeter clockwise.”_

Tony’s heart in his lungs, lungs in his stomach. He’s all jumbled up.

He scours the bunker with FRIDAY in his ear, until. Until.

He comes to a reinforced door, thirty metres below sea level.

A door.

He takes a step back, blasters raised.

*

_I’ll send Lila your regards, shall I? _he asks and Barton’s eyes, wet gunpowder in an instant.

Frightened him, the way death never could.

*

“FRIDAY, scan for life signs,” Tony says on his private AI channel, and she does.

Tony holds it in his clenched palms electric, his hope, such a fragile phenomenon.

“One heat signature detected,” FRIDAY tells him, and Tony feels it. That fragile, phenomenal hope, resting beneath the surface of his skin.

Of course they’d keep them separate. Strategy, right? He’ll get this one out and then Widow or T’Challa or Okoye will find the other, and they’ll fly, fly away from this place, fly wherever they need to go but they’ll fly there together.

Both hands raised, shortrange, Tony blasts open the locking mechanism and the door opens and a voice, a voice Tony really had started to think he’d never hear again, hoarse, rasping, a constant stream like consciousness:

_“…real mad. You know how he gets. Still the same punk now. He picks up half the pencil and brandishes it like a weapon. God. He was always a fighter. You’ve seen it. That look he gets. I told him, Buck –”_

Tony steps through the cloud of broken brick dust, eyes pulled to the sound, to Steve, to _Steve._

Steve’s on the floor, backed up to the wall with nothing but a pair of shorts and a series of striped collars. Thick metal bands pin his legs bloody stretched out on the floor, same as his torso to the wall, and his neck. His arms, too; out against the wall like a martyr on his cross.

Blood his seeped from the metal bands and his hair, dishevelled, stubble on his jaw. Skin ashy grey beneath the half-dried blood.

He stops talking, finally, disturbed by the sound although lacking the recognition to say more and Tony has precisely one moment of relief before –

In front of Steve, in the centre of the room.

There’s a chair, large, angled up and back, not unlike a dentist’s.

Blood surrounds it, a dark sticky glisten and in it. In it.

“FRIDAY,” he says, or maybe screams, or maybe whispers. “I need you to redirect the Widow’s route. Make sure she doesn’t find her way here. Direct T’Challa and Okoye here if you can, but only if it doesn’t alert the Black Widow.”

“Got it, Boss,” FRIDAY says, his girl, his girl.

Tony steps fully into the room, tries and fails to pretend he doesn’t know who’s in that chair.

The body is – _savaged._

Strapped down at all four limbs and his hands, hands that were capable and strong, hands that had killed countless but comforted more.

Tony’s stomach twists painfully where he stands, staring, staring at him, at the gaps of his hands. His eyes. His throat. The grooves of his ears.

It’s not – recent. Tony takes one more step.

The temperature of the room is low, incredibly low. Clint’s blood has all but frozen, and his body must have held together in the chill but there’s no pretending, no hiding. This isn’t _pipped at the post. _He’s been dead for hours, maybe even a day already.

And Steve – _Steve –_

Tony goes to him. Rips himself from the gravity of that chair and crouches next to the wilted bones of Steve Rogers, his _friend, _damnit, always was, of course.

“Hey, Cap,” he says, remembers too late to flip open the suit’s mask, see Steve with his own two eyes, those baby blues, ravaged with tears, bloody throat, cracked lips; a ghastly copy of the face on all those vintage t-shirts.

“Tony,” Steve says, sounding confused.

Tony’s chest is caving in. What a waste after all, pulling out that shrapnel.

“Yeah,” Tony tells him, sincere as he can. “It’s me.”

Then Steve, goddamn Steve. Howard’s dinner table glory, Tony’s first idol.

“Clint’s hurt, Tony,” Steve says, awful worried, crumpled brow.

_Waste, _put it back, put it back, anything, anything is more survivable than this.

“Yeah, he is,” Tony lies. Watches Steve’s dull ocean eyes look back to their teammate. “Steve, I need you to hold still, OK? I’m going to get these off you. Hold still, just – FRIDAY, I need some acute surgery here.”

It’s pointless to explain. Steve’s awake but he’s not here, not anymore. He’s checked out, eyes up soldier, doesn’t even flinch when the laser Tony brings too close to his skin singes him despite Tony’s absolute care.

The metal bands weaken and split, eventually, like everything always does. Like iron, and will, and the Avengers, like a metal arm fused to a supersoldier.

Steve stays loose and still, even when Tony pulls off the collar from his throat, taking with it half-inch spikes that must have been slicing him open over and over for a week. His chest and stomach, scarlet.

When Tony turns back, T’Challa is in the doorway.

He’s taken his helmet off, holding it in his hands like a mark of respect as he stares at Clint, at the body in the chair. Murmurs something Tony does not need translating, because it sounds the same in every language.

“We need to keep Natasha out of here,” Tony says, hot and rash and anxious, blood in the back of his throat and god _no _but this, this isn’t it, isn’t how it goes, this isn’t the deal, is it?

Tony gets an arm under Steve’s shoulder and heaves and Steve allows himself to be brought up to his knees, even lets himself be better propped up against the wall, pliant as a skinny boy in Brooklyn eaten up asthmatic, only not really, because Tony’s pretty sure pliant is one thing this man has never been.

He is now, though, and Tony will take his weight. This, he can do. If nothing else, he must do this. Steve will stumble and Tony will catch him but for now he props him up against the wall and walks on heavy armoured feet to the only other piece of furniture in the room.

A table, dark wood, _best to hide the stains,_ Tony reminds himself with a side order of hysteria and on it, three items.

A knife, crusted with blood he has no interest in touching. A tiny metallic red triangle, which if Tony asked FRIDAY to scan, he knows she would tell him is giving off the faint, steady signal they tracked all the way across the ocean.

And last, most of all, or at least it is to Tony, a pair of violet grey hearing aids, half crushed, still whole.

Instinctively, Tony picks them up, holds them in his palm and listens to Steve’s laboured breaths behind him, to the sound of Okoye’s arrival, her voice low in an exact imitation of her king’s words from before and when he turns around, turns and thinks maybe he wants to know what it means, if it means everything he thinks it does, he’s brought to a halt.

He looks up, along both Wakandan’s sightline, to the ceiling.

The ceiling, the ceiling, and Tony, with his helmet pulled off and no backup comm in his ear, FRIDAY impotent to warn him. Tony looks up just in time to see Natasha Romanov drop down from an open vent.

For a moment, precious and terrible, they all stare at the body in the chair.

“Natasha,” Tony says from where he stands, a view of half her face. It tastes foreign on his tongue. When was the last time he called her that? Has he ever?

Natasha. She walks to Clint, to the torn-up body that was once a person she loved, more than anyone else. She puts a hand on his bare chest, bloodstained and undoubtedly cold, almost as if checking for a heartbeat. Her other hand runs once over his hair, matted red and brown.

Tony moves to stand next to Steve, fist clenched around his stolen prize, and reaches down to pull him up to his feet. Sways, the weight of a Captain sinking over him. When he looks back, it’s to see tears sliding graceless over that givingly beautiful face.

No other outwards sign, no whimpers and no prayers. Even now, she shares it only with Hawkeye. Lets go of him just as quick, steps back as if from a ledge, breath ragged in her throat and those awful spilled tears, eternity in her stare, like a bullet in a void.

Okoye in the doorway and T’Challa standing on the other side of the chair. Tony feels the suit wrestling for control of Steve’s wobbling centre of gravity.

“There are still nine guards alive,” Okoye says, and Natasha disappears into a widow’s mask, porcelain and clear.

“Get them back to Wakanda,” Natasha tells them. “I’m staying.”

T’Challa says something else to Okoye in rapid Wakandan as Tony, he looks at the Black Widow, Natasha, Natalie, who slotted against her not-boyfriend like a chemical bond.

“I will stay, too,” Okoye tells Natasha and Natasha doesn’t respond but Tony sees it anyway in the shape of her mouth; gratitude, relief. T’Challa’s bodyguard indeed.

T’Challa takes the final step forwards.

“We’ll take them back in one jet, leave the other for you when you’re ready,” Tony says, needless, just wants her to know.

_You need to come back eventually._ And she will, Okoye will make sure of it.

Natasha reaches out with steady hands to undo the straps holding Clint down, nothing her quick hands and best knives can’t overcome. Tony doesn’t miss the skim of her fingertips over his skin. There’s a surrealness to it, clawing hysteria at Tony’s hindbrain that nearly says something stupid, something awful.

_Subway, _he had said and Tony had praised him for his humour and he had fucking _glowed _with it.

T’Challa says something to Natasha, something that drags a new curve to her eyes and her mouth. He puts one arm under Clint’s knees, the other under his shoulders and when he lifts, gentle, strong, rippling purple in the low light Natasha reaches to help him and out of her mouth falls a single, helpless: _“Don’t!”_

Wretched sound she swallows back down. Don’t – drop him? Don’t hurt him?

Her mouth open, her eyes. She stalks around the chair and for all the shred that has taken what was once Hawkeye, she kisses the blunt square of his jaw, just the once.

Tony looks away, looks at the torn-up throat of Captain Steve Rogers, mind out for the count yet on his feet against all odds, littered with puncture wounds across his battered body. Tony carries his weight for a change, holds him steady. Lighthouse, port in the storm of this room.

He’d rather stare at those ugly little wounds forever than see Natasha Romanov cry.

Okoye stands next to Natasha, tall and fearsome, just shy of too close. _His bodyguard, _she’d said, all approval and pride and yes, it’s there, Tony sees it. A mutual, tormenting respect.

T’Challa, holding in his arms the precious cargo that will undo the Avengers one last time.

Tomorrow, Steve will say terrible things and Tony will respond, because some lessons do not stick. Not now, not yet.

Now, _now._

It’ll exhaust the repulsors, but he’s pretty sure he can fly a half-starved, mostly unconscious Captain America a quarter of a mile like this.

Tony grips the tipping scale weight of Steve Rogers, holds him close over his shoulders like a safety blanket. _My friend, _he hears again and again, his own worst enemy. Pulls him on shuffling, bending feet away from this place, let it burn, let the spiders scourge it.

It’s slow going, anxious. Claws in his spine.

Halfway down the corridor, the stink of dry blood clogging up his nose, Tony hears it. He won’t forget it, not in all his years to come.

Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow; the offkey pitch of her one and only scream.

*

_(Walk away, Barnes, _he says and he means it; begs it in his soul.)

*

Tony keeps his eyes closed as he settles back, too many pillows; can feel the feet on his bed, resting near his knees.

“Oh no, tensions rising in the Odom household,” Clint tuts, sounding genuinely devasted.

When Tony dares a glance, he’s already smirking with victory.

“Stop hating on Khloé,” Tony tells him again and Clint’s laugh is boisterous, loud, brassy.

“Just wait until Steve gets here,” Clint warns him. “You’ll be begging for the simple pleasures of TMZ.”

His fingers are soft in the crook of Tony’s elbow, calloused reminders, not even stroking or soothing. Just there, as if checking his pulse.

“Steve?” Tony scoffs, to Clint’s judgy bullet lead eyes.

Clint flicks the teddy bear’s nose, probably because he knows better than to flick Tony’s. Hopefully, anyway.

“Steve,” he says gravely. “He’s _super_ pissed you had surgery without telling us. Now, are you more interested in an article on predictions for the next Grammies, or the latest sex scandals? Full disclosure, you’ve got a tacit mention in one of them and quite frankly, I am _impressed.”_

Tony doesn’t fight his grin. Holds it in his face, generous and grateful and quite suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to cry. He closes his eyes again, listens to that cornfield, brassy voice.

Clint reads them both, throwing in a few of his own opinions for good measure.

His fingers never stray from Tony’s arm.

*


End file.
